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| Nikki Weaver, Leif Norby, Laura Faye-Smith |
Peculiar and wonderful, Theresa Rebeck's The Scene as staged by Portland Playhouse tells a sad tale. An out-of-work actor loses his home, his marriage, his best friend and every shred of his dignity over the course of the play. But it is also funny, hilarious even. And at the end of the play, you wonder how so much comedy has laughed its way through such much disintegration.
I blame Clea. Or rather, I praise Clea, because she is a very great invention, a vehicle of devilment so subtle that she capsizes all of the naturalistic inclinations of American theater and leaves them sinking as she sails blithely into the sunset.
Clea is a character in Rebeck's play. But she's not a character in the way we usually think of characters. She's not a representative of something real, though she's probably a refinement, a reductio ad absurdam, of someone real. In his glowing review of the play, the New York Times critic, Christopher Isherwood, said that she resembled all the young attractive women in Manhattan hitting the party scene in little black dresses and very high heels. And I agree, that there's enough of resemblance for her to sneak under our radar -- we think of her as a traditional character.
But come on. Clea's mythic; she's not human, she just looks that way. At one point the actor whose life she has crumpled calls her soulless. And that's true enough, but beside the point. At another point, he calls her a god. And that's exactly how I think of her now. Rebeck has created a goddess, a Fury maybe, given her the language of a vapid '90s co-ed who's well-versed in magazine pop psychology, and then set her loose on Gotham, specifically on the lives of Charlie, his wife Stella and his best friend Lewis. Mere mortals, they don't stand a chance.
Now, we've seen this sort of thing in zombie movies, and science-fiction pot-boilers like the Species movies. But Rebeck's Clea has more nuance than that. She's more like Diana Christensen in Paddy Chayefsky's film Network, directed by Sidney Lumet with Faye Dunaway as Diana. A "real" situation is going on around her, but her presence kicks it into the land of the surreal. Rebeck inserts her into a little four-hander, in which all the rest of the characters are mostly believable, and yes, the surreal starts to bust out all over.
